Western Digital Releases Faster Drive

7,200 RPM Caviar available in 100 GB configuration
By Dave Nagel

Western Digital says it has a new, faster hard drive on the market. The latest addition to Western Digital's Caviar line of budget desktop drives, the Caviar Special Edition uses a 7,200 RPM mechanism and an 8 MB buffer up to a 25 percent performance boost in some tests, according to the company.

A 2 MB cache is fairly typical of 7,200 RPM drives on the market right now. Western Digital says the new model is the only one on the market with an 8 MB cache. Buffer is used to hold recent data retrieved from the hard disk and to prefetch information, reducing the number of actual accesses to the disk. The higher the buffer, the more information that can be stored, the higher the performance on that information.